Five thousands workers at Swansea Council are to be balloted on industrial action in support of IT staff who are currently on strike in protest at the proposed privatisation of their jobs. Some 800 people attended a union meeting yesterday when staff voted in favour of a ballot.

If you’re bracing yourself for a long haul downloading WinXP SP2, and are wondering what on earth you’re going to do to fill the time while your machine stuffs its belly with life-enhancing patches and security bells and whistles, then look no further than Origami Underground.

Microsoft has been rapped over the knuckles over an anti-Lunix advertising campaign. The Advertising Standards Association in the UK has ruled that the ad makes "misleading" claims, and has told the company change the copy on the advertisement forthwith.

The phrase "the network is the computer" was originally coined to suggest that computers connected by a network make a much more powerful solution. But, nowadays it has another connotation as more and more intelligence is being put into network appliances.

Most Britons do not consider themselves to be workaholics, according to a survey by employment specialists Begbies Traynor. Despite 98 per cent of respondents stressing that it was important to them to be perceived as good at their job, 81 per cent acknowledged that they worked to live rather than lived to work. Although such an attitude is positive in some respects, a worrying 30 per cent of respondents claimed that one in four of their colleagues were simply ‘serving time’ at work rather than climbing the career ladder.

What would you do with ten megabits per second, instead of 512kilobits? Better start thinking, because even with the big telcos dragging their feet, that's going to be commonplace by 2007... and it's already a reality for many Scandinavian computer users.

More than 200 civil servants in the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) have been disciplined for surfing the Web for porn during office hours. In the last eight months the staff accessed over two million pornographic images, including 18,000 involving child abuse.

There has bee a dramatic increase in the number of employees who take unnecessary absences from work, according to a survey by employment law firm Peninsula. Figures reveal that 85 per cent of businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between genuine absences and those that are made up in order to skive off work.

NASA has released a stunning new picture of Cassiopeia A, a supernova remnant. The image, made at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory contains nearly 200 times as much data as the first image made at the facility, five years ago.

Australia has caused a certain amount of unease in Indonesia by announcing its intention to acquire long-range stealth cruise missiles, The Australian reports. The missiles are intended to plug the gap between the retirement of Australia's F-111 fleet in 2010 and the arrival of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) - slated for deployment around three years later.